1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a technology for controlling print data outputs, and more particularly to a method, an information processing apparatus, and a computer-readable storage medium that detect specific information from a piece of print data to process the print data.
2. Description of the Related Art
Information processing systems, which are a plurality of printers connected to a network, have been employed in organizations such as companies, government agencies, educational institutions, and hospitals. In such an information processing system, users designate one of the printers for executing a printing process before executing the printing.
For such an information processing system, some disclosures have been made on a technology that determines the conditions for outputting a piece of print data based on a piece of specific information extracted from the print data. For example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2011-002881 discloses an information processing system that extracts character strings from a piece of print data in the enhanced metafile (EMF) format, detects a character string that matches a specific keyword, determining an output condition corresponding to the character string, and performs a process corresponding to the output condition, e.g., prints a watermark or replaces the characters.
The order of the characters included in print data in the EMF format is sometimes different from that in a display image of the print data, the display image representing an image actually to be printed on a paper sheet, as illustrated in FIG. 8, because the print data in the EMF format describes the characters in the order in which the characters are plotted by the application having generated the print data. The information processing system disclosed in Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2011-002881, however, extracts a character string matching a keyword from a piece of print data in which the characters are ordered differently from those in the display image, that is, in which the characters are not reorganized yet. The information processing system is therefore incapable of detecting a keyword accurately.
Therefore, there is a need to provide a method, and an information processing apparatus, and a computer-readable storage medium capable of improving the accuracy of character string detection.